Design of sustainable and resilient eco-industrial parks: Planning the flows integration network through multi-objective optimization

An Eco-Industrial Park is a community of businesses located together, exchanging material and energy with each other, to achieve sustainability advantages for its participants. The main benefits of this kind of parks are related to the three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social. An important problem when designing and redesigning an Eco-Industrial Park is the infrastructure planning to connect plants. In this context, the connectivity of this network plays a significant role, because of material and energy sharing, and the new dependence and the problem thereof: failures are also propagated within the network. In this sense, the goal of this work is to formulate and solve an optimization problem to design the material network of an EIP, considering environmental, economic, and resilience aspects in this effort. Specifically, this problem is constructed based on two well-known EIPs: Kalundborg, in Denmark, and Ulsan, in South Korea. The novelty of the present model is to simultaneously consider both aspects, configuring an EIP which not only optimizes its usual economic benefits but also defines its topology to improve resilience. Therefore, the resulting configuration would achieve economic and environmental benefits, ensuring the operation of the park if any participant suffers a disruptive event. In order to analyze and to compare the use of this optimization model when designing EIPs, five configurations are obtained for each case study: three single-objective solutions, optimizing the economic, environmental, and resilience aspects, separately; and two multi-objective solutions, considering the economic and environmental aspects, and the economic, environmental, and resilience aspects, simultaneously. The resulting individual configurations present the best value for each assessed characteristic among all the cases considered, even when comparing them with the reported situation of the park. These solutions represent an orientation to project changes on the existing Eco-Industrial Parks in Kalundborg and Ulsan. Finally, even though the proposed model presents several simplifications, it allows to design more resilient and more sustainable EIPs. In this sense, this model can support decision-makers in the industrial design, generating new alternatives to implement eco-industrial parks. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.